Blog assignment 7

Blog 7, option 3

And now, for another highly unorganized compilation...

Troy and his son Cory have the most confrontational relationship in this play. There comes a point when a son disagrees with his father, which eventually comes down to a general difference in philosophy on the best way to raise a kid. Such confrontation can be expressed in many different ways. Troy thinks his discouraging Cory from the football team is just, because of two reasons: One stems from love, and the other stems from jealousy. On one hand Troy doesn't want to see his son's hopes of being on the football team smashed like his dreams were of playing baseball. ...

As a father, Troy wants to give his son “the best of himself,” as Rose said.

Troy saw his own father as “the devil himself.” He bested his dad by withholding his assault on Cory with the bat, a gesture of affection that his own dad couldn't boast. This is where Troy shows his learned superiority to his father, who at one point beat him with a pair of reigns, to “whup” him into line. Troy claims his father wanted “the girl for himself.” This could reflect the same kind of misunderstanding that Cory has for his father's intentions. When Cory calls Troy “just an old man,” Troy reacts with the same hostility that his own father had toward him. Rose further pushes Cory to understand his father's love for him, when Cory threatens the ultimate disrespect of not attending Troy's funeral. She acts as a kind of bridge between Cory and Troy in the islands of compatibility.

Troy, like any breadwinner, seeks appreciation for the hard times he has been through and the work he has put in for his family. Lyons regularly provides this appreciation by owning his ignorance of such experiences, and thus gains some level of appreciation from his father. Cory never shows this kind of appreciation, because he feels so wronged by his dad denying him from the football team. This explains some of the violence that results in Cory leaving towards the end of the play. Cory and Troy's relationship is strongly cleft by Troy's life-long disappointing experience with baseball, and how he never made a living at it because of his color. Cory interprets his opposition as a hostile display of “jealousy,” to which Troy is unable to rise above a hostile response.

This give-and-take relationship between father and son is also shared between a mother and her daughter. In the last scene, this trend is reflected by the exchange between Rose and Raynell, “a watched pot never boils,” to which Raynell responds, “This ain't even no pot,” which is a problem with the idiom that Rose probably never thought of before, because she was too busy trying to maintain the existence of the pot, which comes from making a living. Again, from a misunderstanding, comes a new idea. Only with an absence of hostility. But to Raynell, a little girl with different values than her mother, advances beyond what the idiom means to a viewpoint yet unexplored. Raynell finds a problem, and the mother offers a solution, sometimes they show their disagreement through misunderstanding the meaning of what was said. and often try to think of a better thing to say.